Author Archives: Laban

(Thanks to reader Septimus Lupo for this classic.)

“Row erupts over golly exhibition” – the BBC England page finds room for this major story.

A row has broken out over a golly exhibition at a Hampshire museum.

A row. Gosh. Gollygosh. Tell more.

A collection of golly badges on display in Westbury Manor Museum in Fareham has been criticised for its perceived racist connotations. Dr John Molyneux, from the University of Portsmouth, said the items should not be regarded simply as a childhood pastime or hobby. But Nick Martin who owns the collection said the exhibition had been very popular and no-one had complained.

I see. One person says it’s racist. We have a BBC story. A story big enough for the England page.

And who is this one person ? It sounds awfully like this John Molyneux.

“John Molyneux is a socialist, activist and writer. He is a member of the British SWP (Socialist Workers Party) and of RESPECT. He lectures at Portsmouth University, and writes mainly about Marxist theory and art.” There’s more at Wikipedia.

I would just love to know the processes by which this ‘story’ found its way to the BBC and onto the England page. You don’t think he just rang up a mate, do you ?

Dr Molyneux has every right to pursue his political agendas as best he may. Whether it is right that the BBC should act as the megaphone for an SWP activist’s one-man ‘protest’ I’m not so sure.

(Note btw two other reports on the front page – the believed arrest of a believed man for what police believe was a hammer attack – and the deaths of two ‘graffiti artists’. Didn’t they used to be called vandals ?)

UPDATE – this might be a lazy journalism/bias mix rather than the old comrades network in action. The story appeared in the Johnstone Press-owned Portsmouth News on the 10th, was picked up by the Daily Mail the same day, and the Mirror the following day (note that none of the foregoing are financed by compulsory taxation). Two days later the rehashed story appeared on the BBC. They might have done a bit of checking, but why bother when it rings all the right bells ? (Even nobler, unmercenary bloggers may be guilty of such sins on rare occasions.) Thanks to Matthew in the comments at Tim Worstall’s.

UPDATE 2 – Andrew points out that the BBC certainly know who Dr Molyneux is.

At last. The BBC give us the detailed story on the school hammer attack.

She told the BBC the men attacked the boy and then another got out a hammer and starting hitting him.

“He fell to the floor and asked them to stop, but they kept kicking him.”

She added: “The boy tried to get up but they kept hitting him, then suddenly they all ran away.”

Police have arrested eight male youths aged between 14 and 20 in connection with the incident.

Those right-wing hate-sheets the Guardian and the Independent tell the same story but with a few angles that the BBC either overlooked or just didn’t consider relevant.

Some parents at Ridgeway School in Wroughton, near Swindon, said the attack, in which four Asian men pinned the boy down at the end of the school day on Thursday, was racially motivated.
Mr Colledge said he was on patrol in the grounds when the boy, who is white, was attacked. “After school had ended for the day and pupils were exiting the premises at least four young adults unknown to the school came into the tennis courts and attacked the pupil, we believe with something similar to a hammer.” He said he understood the boy had been hit more than once and was “bleeding profusely but conscious at all times”.

He added: “Relations seem to be very good and pupils mix, play football and chat together. It’s predominantly a white school. Asian pupils probably make up less than five per cent.” But Mr Colledge had heard the attackers were relatives of a pupil at the school.

A mother, who did not wish to be named, said she had heard there had been previous racially aggravated incidents at the school. She believes children walking home from school were subject to verbal and physical abuse from relations of Asian pupils at the school.
Police have arrested eight male youths aged between 14 and 20 in connection with the incident.

That big-budget outfit the Swindon Advertiser also picks up a few things the BBC are prevented from reporting due to budget restraints.

The attack has left many parents afraid to let their children go to school.

A concerned dad, who did not want to be named, said he doubted his children would be going to school today after what had happened.

He said: “Both of my kids saw what happened. They are both traumatised by it. We are shell-shocked. This was a particularly nasty attack.

“This is the third major incident that’s happened in six months.”

He said security around the school grounds needed to be tighter.

“The security is absolutely appalling,” he said. “This is horrendous and it needs to be highlighted.

“We don’t expect the police to be there 24/7 but it’s time the school spent some money on putting up fencing around the perimeter.”

Another mum, who asked not to be named, said she would not be sending her children to school today.

“This is not the first time something like this has happened and something needs to be done,” she said.

“I am absolutely petrified about what might have happened.

“I don’t want my child in the school but he has his exams to take in May and, apart from getting me into trouble, how is it going to help him in the future?”

She said that parents would be waiting at the school gates this morning to demand a meeting with the headteacher.

“Something needs to be done,” she said.

“The last time we were told it was being dealt with and now we are back in the same situation.

“Hopefully this new head will take a different stance.”

In May, six teenagers from Ridgeway were taken to hospital after a group of men jumped out of two cars and attacked students, leaving one with a broken jaw.

Police patrolled outside the school in Inverary Road for a week in an effort to soothe the worries of parents and pupils.

Officers dealing with the case at the time refused to comment on speculation that the fight was racially motivated.

Now it could be argued – and no doubt has been – that reporting such inter-racial attacks could inflame feelings and damage ‘social cohesion’ – and that therefore details of attacker and victim ethnicity should be downplayed or suppressed. It’s not a position I’d agree with – for starters it should not be the job of a news organisation to suppress facts – but it’s a respectable argument for a state-owned, non-independent broadcaster to put forward – assuming it applies to ALL inter-racial or inter-communal attacks. But this isn’t what the BBC do. In practice, attacks by members of the majority community get ‘big air’, attacks on members of the majority community don’t. This not only, in the Internet age, destroys BBC credibility as a news source for a (currently small but) increasing number of people, but by giving a one-sided picture of inter-racial attacks it creates an untrue narrative of only majority perpetrators and only minority victims.

A while back Yasmin Alibhai-Brown wrote an Evening Standard piece commenting on double standards in the reporting of racist murder :

I have talked to some black and Asian inmates serving time in prison for such crimes: most justify their actions as collective retribution for attacks on “their people”.

“Attacks on their people”. Where would they get those ideas from, I wonder ?

If a gang of white men entered a school, grabbed and held down an Asian pupil, then beat his head with a hammer, what are the chances that:

a) the BBC would hide the report away in the local county news pages?

b) the report would studiously avoid mentioning that the attackers were white and the victim Asian?

Call me a cynic, but I think it would, not unreasonably, be a major story, on the national radio and TV news bulletins – as for example, the far less life-threatening reported attack on the Sikh schoolboy was.

Here’s the report from the £3bn taxpayer-funded BBC, and the Metro report – Metro being the freebie newspaper owned by Associated Newpapers.

According to the school’s head, there was a ‘similar type of incident’ previously. But the BBC report has a distinct air of “move on now … nothing to see here …”. You do have to wonder if the same bias that previously informed BBC news coverage of racist murder is operating here.

An Observer portrait of Migrationwatch chair Sir Andrew Green, and his recent Today programme appearance (RealAudio) contains some interesting asides.

‘We probably were reluctant and slow to take him seriously to begin with,’ says one senior executive in BBC News. ‘We probably didn’t like what he had to say. But then we were also slow to pick up on immigration as a story, not least because we are a very middle-class organisation and the impact of mass immigration was being felt more in working-class communities.’ But Sir Andrew plugged away, throwing out statistic after statistic. ‘If he’s proved himself,’ says the BBC executive, ‘it’s because he hasn’t put a foot wrong on the information he’s published.’

An echo there of ex-business editor Jeff Randall’s criticisms.

‘Whenever we had an anti-immigration interviewee, it was a Nazi with a tattoo on his face who looked like he’d just bitten the head off a cat. I pointed out that it’s the white working class who have to make immigration work. Immigrants don’t move to Hampstead, mate’.

You can see this new, less biased approach in the reporting. Migrationwatch used to be “the self-styled Migrationwatch UK pressure group“. Now they’ve been upgraded to “pressure group Migrationwatch UK“.

Favoured pressure groups, for example anti-prison campaigners, are still “the crime reduction charity NACRO” or “the independent Commission“.

Not exactly about bias – in fact not at all, but it’s Christmas … the Sage of Peebles on Kirsty Young and the departure of Michael Grade.

… the coverage of two court cases where teachers are alleged to have had sex with pupils.

A Grammar school music teacher embarked on an affair with a sixth-form pupil, a court heard on Tuesday.

The headline originally referred to the school’s grammar status – it’s since been amended. Contrast with :

An art teacher has appeared in court charged with sexual offences against girls over a period of 30 years.

Not ‘a comprehensive school art teacher’ ? It’s the little things.

via DFH in the comments, Raymond Snoddy (‘until this week not one word on national TV bulletins‘) interviews Peter Horrocks (Realplayer video), head of TV news, on the Kriss Donald coverage. They’ve had 200 complaints about the lack thereof. But then ‘the British National Party has encouraged its members to write in‘, as Mr Horrocks points out.

He struggles gamely with a few straw men of his own devising (I paraphrase)- ‘we couldn’t cover the trial the way we’d like to under Scottish law – for instance we aren’t allowed to show photos of the accused, which obviously show that they were Asian and the victim was white …’

I see. If only those photos were available it would have been all over BBC Television news ! And was the particular ethnicity of the alleged murderers relevant ? Surely it was their alleged murderousness and their alleged racism that was relevant ?

We see the ‘only whites could be racists but it’s changing‘ meme a la Mark Easton.

‘I think there is something interesting about racial crime, that in the past it’s been seen as largely racial crime against blacks and Asians …‘

Been seen by whom exactly ? You’d think he was looking in from the outside, dispassionately describing some fascinating natural process outside man’s power to control.

Regrets, he’s had a few.

‘I do wish we’d covered the trial on its first day …‘

‘But you also didn’t cover the first trial’

‘Yes, and we should have done – and we should have done that …‘

We’ll add that to ‘in hindsight, it was a mistake not to report the case of Ross Parker more extensively’ and ‘I think, however, we should have mentioned the Whelan murder, however briefly‘, shall we ?

DFH also provided links to the Fran Unsworth interview after the Anthony Walker coverage. Ms Unsworth doesn’t know if the Kriss Donald murder was a racist crime, and she also knows that there are about 850 homicides a year in the UK (850 homicides is the England and Wales figure). Fran Unsworth is head of “BBC Newsgathering”.

“Their force is wonderful great and strong” wrote Admiral Howard of the Armada, “yet we pluck their feathers little by little“. Or as Hardy rightly said “continual dropping will wear away a Stone – ay, more – a Diamond.” Maybe one day we won’t have to do this. Chance would be a fine thing.